Advertising, and the constructed nature of brand-names, was a topic to which Clark frequently returned in documenting ‘Words in War-Time’. Even before war broke out, Clark had started to collect relevant examples, arguing that – for the linguistic and historian alike – these could be seen as a rich (and often neglected) resource of information about the embedding of language in culture and society. If the Oxford English Dictionary maintained a steadfast opposition to evidence of this kind (disallowing proper names as part of the legitimate territory of lexicography and the history of words), Clark again deliberately moved in a different direction. The notebooks gave him useful autonomy to explore language and meaning, and its responsiveness to on-going history, as he wished.

As previous posts have explored, the specific circumstances of war often rendered language a highly effective means by which patriotism or other issues of national allegiance could be claimed – or rejected. Consideration of form and, in particular, of word-forms which – rightly or wrongly – connoted German identity, could attract particular attention in this respect. The popular press, for example, repeatedly appropriated German patterns of spelling, placing German kultur against English culture in ways which intentionally rendered the former a by-word for savagery and barbarity. If kultur and culture derive from the same root, being, in reality, shared and cognate forms,** they could nevertheless be rendered antonyms in popular discourse — see e.g. the heading ‘More “Kultur”’, which in the Daily Express on 21 September 1914, accompanying an article (and an all too telling image) about the devastation of Rheims Cathedral.

The currency of other lexemes such as Teutonised – or non-Teutonic – both of which Clark records in his notebooks from September 1914 – easily reveals the identity politics at stake. Being Teutonised (a form still unrecorded in the OED) was, as another article in the Daily Express confirmed, seen as highly negative – suggesteing unwarranted alignment with the enemy in ways which are firmly delegitimised. Being, or being seen as, germanophile (here in another form which gained newly negative connotations — Clark records its use from September 11 1914) was, in similar ways, by no means seen as desirable.

An extensive anti-German lexis could, in such ways, became another aspect of the war of words. Notions of being pro-German, or Hun-like (both of which Clark also documents from September 1914) would all be used to mobilise highly negative feeling. The Hunite – recorded in the Daily Express on 19th September (and absent, then and now, from the Oxford English Dictionary) – emerges, for example, as a highly effective way of labelling, and stigmatizing, the presence of unwarranted German sympathies, not least as indicated by a less than whole-hearted supported for the war effort or, still worse, by qualms about war per se. ‘Chiding the Hunites’, the heading of the article states. As the OED records, the suffix –ite was far from neutral: forms in which –ite appear, it states, ‘have a tendency to be depreciatory, being mostly given by opponents, and seldom acknowledged by those to whom they are applied’. To use language reflective of what the Express termed ‘odious Germanic taint’ could be seen as highly problematic – prompting, as we have seen, a range of acts of renaming and redefinition.

One of Clark’s particularly interesting examples in this context was the advertising campaign taken out in the autumn of 1914 by Krieger, the brand name of what was given as ‘the electric carriage syndicate’. Here, as the company realised, form and meaning could intersect in newly problematic ways. Krieger was, in some ways, ahead of its time – its electric vehicles offer early prototypes of a technology being explored and extended today. Clark noted the collocation electric carriage (also absent from the OED) as a combination of marked interest; if ‘carriages’ looked back to the past, ‘electric’ offered a new sense of modernity (as well as extending early designations of the car as ‘horseless carriage’). Nevertheless, as war began, the suspicion that, for Krieger, its name (and hence its products)—might also be seen as overly ‘Teutonised’ (and, indeed, ‘Germanophile’) was a source of self-evident concern. Krieg, as the German word for ‘war’, seemed less than ideal as a defining element in the name by which the product was popularly known, not least given the prevalence of similar Germanic forms – such as kriegspiel or kriegsmetall — in other contemporary (and highly negative) news accounts.

For Krieger, a range of advertisements therefore swiftly appeared, proclaiming British national identity and unimpeachable patriotic credentials.

‘The above company has been, from its formation in April 1903, a British Company’,

as readers were, for example, reminded. More to the point, perception of its association with German krieg is depicted as misguided in the extreme. Visual similarity was, it stressed, a false friend indeed; only in error, we are informed, could the brand names be read as krieg plus er, with its disturbing associations of militarism and aggression. Form — in both speech and writing – is strategically repositioned, while recent history clearly demanded a set of history lessons of its own. In the advertising which appears in autumn 1914, the name loses its hard Germanic /g/ and gains a small but suggestive é acute.

Etymology, in turn, is made to validate not the all too negative German krieg but instead an identity in French by which Krieger derives not form Krieg plus er, but from a ‘Monsieur Kriéger’, a Frenchman, resident in Paris, where

‘the original Kriéger Company was formed, and from whom the London Krieger company purchased its patents’.

Form was renegotiated once more – Kriéger, once French, had become British by losing its distinctive é, as well as gaining a different pronunciation. Commercial and linguistic assimilation had worked together. With the advent of war, the accent was, however, to be put on success in quite literal ways. Advertising campaigns carefully stress the allegiance which the small but significant é confirms. Krieger was carefully distanced while Kriéger could, as potential purchasers were reassured, be bought without qualms. French diacritics could get a new lease of life in English. Language, yet again, could be used with tactical intent — here, in what one might nevertheless see, as a strategic exercise in damange limitation.***

Notes

**Culture derives, as OED confirms, from Latin cultūra, and was borrowed into English via Anglo-Norman and Middle French after the Normal Conquest. Originally used to refer to literal cultivation of the land, German ideas of culture (signifying the ideas, customs, etc. of a society or group) became prominent in English after the eighteenth century. See culture (n.), OED Online.

*** Modern parallels can be found in the suddenly negative connotations of ‘Isis’ as a company name, as reported in the press in November 2014. This, too, can prompt issues of identity and subsequent rebranding.

War, with some irony, did not yet exist in the Oxford English Dictionary as Clark began his project of collecting up the vocabulary of what we now know as the First World War. The relevant section of the Dictionary would not be published until 1921. Our modern terminology depends, of course, firmly on hindsight. A first world war, as we now know, was followed by a second. The numerical sequencing offers ominous potential for a third or fourth which, as yet, remain unrealised.

Here, too, both language and history in 1914 could offer the potential for other modes of expression to come to the fore. How exactly this war was seen and discussed in its first few weeks – when its duration and scale were as yet unknown — can therefore be especially interesting. The Daily Express on Friday 11th Sept was, for example, already contemplating the coming “war winter”: ’Everybody is preparing for a “war winter”’, it stated, in ways which also suggest some problems for the popular mythography by which WWI was expected to be ‘over by Christmas’. German plans for a quick defeat of France had failed. The conflict seemed likely to set in. “War winter”, set apart by its framing scare quotes, is clearly a form which both Clark and the Daily Express regarded as new and distinctive, andparticularly evocative of time and place.

As in the South African or Boer War to which comparison is often made in these early weeks, the geographical limits of conflict can also influence the terms which appear. ‘In the South Africa war we wanted men who could shoot and could ride horses; in this European war we want men who can shoot and ride bicycles, as the Daily Express on September 1st had explained. War here is distinctively ‘European’ — Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and Belgium were, for example, all involved. Conflict had not yet spread across the globe. Language, obsolescence, and history can, of course, all neatly interact in the rise and fall of labels of this kind: the European war would prove ephemeral — not because war ended, but because it transformed into something far larger. As the Scotsman on 11 September already suggests, its potential is already seen as such that it can be referred to as a ‘great war’; it stressed, without reservation, ‘the justice of the cause of Britain in the great war’.

Interestingly, as Clark’s notebooks attest, the diction of the world war, and other associated compounds, also appears within the first few weeks of conflict. The Daily Express on September 1st 1914 could, for example, also move with surprising rapidity into the diction of a war which was already seen in global terms. ‘The result of this world-war may depend on a very slight preponderance of force of either side’, it stated. Here, too, shirking was not an option; the obligation for everyone who could participate was made plain. As the Daily Express warned two days later, here providing another compound for Clark’s growing collection, the enemy was intent on world-domination. World-conflictwas similar, used in the Scotsman on 15th September, as was world-Empire, which had been used in the same newspaper four days earlier. Such forms can, however, prove false friends in more ways than one. These early compounds with world- are not always what they might seem. As in the last three examples, they deliberately appropriate German habits of word-formation – and hyphenation – on analogy, as Clark observes, with forms such as Welt-politikand Welt-reich. This can, in the popular press, be used to provide a neat linguistic mirroring of the extent of German ambition, and the language in which this was expressed. As Clark realised, German – not English, was the driving force behind such uses, in ways which could prove remarkably prevalent over the early months of war.

As in the Scotsman on Friday 11 September, compounds with world- serve therefore to crystallize the aggrandizing ambition of the enemy, here with the potential to create a world-Empire. Reportage is from a German point of view; context is all-important:

war with France was received with satisfaction, as there were colonies to be annexed. England’s intervention was hailed with jubilation, as indicating the magnificent prospect of world-Empire that success would bring.

A further report in the Scotsman on Friday 18th September makes these critical differences of language and identity plain, setting a world-destiny used of Germany (and German ambitions) against a destiny that Britain must instead seize for the good:

Whatever the world-destiny of Germany may be, we in Great Britain are ourselves conscious of a destiny and a duty. That destiny and duty, alike for us and all the English-speaking race, call upon us to uphold the common rule of justice’

Forms such as these are, in effect, loan-translations – unfamiliarity acts to distance and divide. Newness hence co-exists with another aspect by which aliens (and the alien in other respects) can deliberately be set against apart. Punctuation – often ignored – can, as here, inform a highly critical reading. The Allies were intentionally fighting a European war – citations from German speeches, as reported in the press, stressed instead the desire for a world-war by which conquest might be far-reaching. Like the contrast between German kolossal and BrE colossal — which, as Clark notes, was another strategic and popular, opposition in contemporary accounts– the form of words could act as another image of nationhood, raising other issues by which people are seen to speak – or not – the ‘same’ language. In the words of the Scotsman, ‘we’, as an ‘English-speaking race’ were seeking a war in which a ‘world-destiny’ might not be realised. Language can be used to set up borders which, at least intentionally, put the enemy on the outside.

‘War in the air, so long the dream of the imaginative novelist, has become a terrible reality’, the Scotsman noted in September 1914, here in another clipping which found its way into Clark’s archive of words. For Clark, as his notebooks record, flight would serve as a particularly telling domain of language and history, providing — from the early days of war — compelling evidence of wide range of new collocations and constructions. New identities proliferated; attack, as newspapers reported, might now come from aerial enemies while a new breed of soldier-aviators were early recognised as important in the directions war might take. ‘We shall no doubt hear more of the desperate missions our fancy has usually associated with the work of the soldier-aviator’, as the Scotsman noted on August 18th 1914; ‘Precautions have been taken with a view to possible visits from aerial enemies at night’, it likewise recorded on September 8th, in a report on Paris at war.Nevertheless, as Clark’s clippings demonstrate, explaining — and describing — these new realities of conflict could be difficult. Did one use aerial raid or air raid in documenting war in the air? Both appear in early pages of Clark’s notebooks, describing attacks on Paris and Rheims. ‘Interesting Details of the Aerial Raid’, the Scotsman announced on 24th September, for example, describing an ‘air raid’ made by the British on the German frontier.** The OED, as then published, maintained a conspicuous silence; the relevant sections had been completed in 1884. Here an aeroplane was ‘a semi-transparent fabric of the nature of a thin crape’, while an aeronaut was ‘One who sails through the air, or who makes balloon ascents; a balloonist. Clark’s evidence on aviator, aeronaut, and airman, of aviation school, aeroplane service, and aerodrome swiftly confirmed, in this respect, the language – and history – of a very different time. Similar was airmanship (‘’it was superb airmanship’, the Evening News stated on September 3rd). This, as Clark explained, referred to the ability to manage an airship (rather than ‘skill in managing a balloon’, as the OED had earlier stated). Such changes reflected on-going history with marked specificity.As Clark explores, the framing diction of airships (which were likewise absent from the first edition of the OED) would, in this respect, come to inform a range of nautical extensions as journalists strove to report the events taking place across Europe. Attack by ‘a fleet of airships’ had, in fact, also long been the territory of the ‘imaginative novelist’ , as H.G. Wells’s novel War in the Air (1908) confirms. Yet as in the Scotsman on Saturday September 5th,, these terms were to be familiarised in fact rather than fiction, as in reports of the German aerial fleets which sailed across the sky in search of objects to attack: ‘Leiutenants Zalin and Rheinhardt of the aerial fleet have been awarded iron crosses for distinguished achievements’, the Scotsman noted; ’German Air Fleetto attack Paris’, it stated two days later. Aerial piracy becomes, by a further extension, another prominent image in these early days of war. As a range of clippings in Clark’s notebooks confirm, this could convey the ruthlessness and depredation which piracy had traditionally connoted, while simultaneously being transplanted to the conditions of strikingly modern warfare. ‘The aerial pirate stopped in its swoops, and turned so suddenly I wondered it did not break amidships’, an illustrative clipping from the Evening News on 3rd September states. Such forms also, of course, effectively demarcated the conditions of war in other ways. An aerial pirate was, of necessity, an enemy’s airship, as Clark confirms in his accompanying definition; it was, he added, one bound moreover on an errand of destruction’. A pirate here meant a ‘pirate-ship’, he clarified, rather than those on board. Piracy here defined the enemy – the activities of the allies demanded a different, and far more legitimatized, diction. Yet at stake on both sides was, of course, the conquest of the air– another combination which Clark early picks out in use, here in the Star on September 5th: ‘the conquest of the air has served to cloak the most infamous stain in contemporary history. It has demonstrated that the means of flying, in the hands of barbarians, have brought into prominence their savage, terrible, and ignoble brutality’.

** This still antedates, if by four days, the evidence of the modern OED. The entry for airmanship, in OED Online, likewise omits evidence for the war years, moving instead from 1879 to 1937 in ways which occlude the changing senses which are at stake. See “airmanship, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2014. Web. 3 September 2014.

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About the Author

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. She has published widely on the history of the English, and on the social, cultural, and ideological issues that words and dictionary-making can reveal. Recent books include Lost for Words. The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2005) ‘Talking Proper’. The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (2007), Dictionaries. A Very Short Introduction (2011), The Oxford History of English (updated edition, 2012) and, together with Freya Johnston, Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (2012). She is currently finishing a book on eighteenth-century language and Samuel Johnson, and plans to spend the next four years working on Clark.